Hispaniola. A Caribbean island divided by old great power
rivalry by European superpowers. Today still divided by race, language and
attitudes. On one side of the divided island
is Haiti that's 90 percent Black (African descendants) while the neighboring
Dominican Republic, the other side, is Spanish speaking. But the differences do
not end there even if both races and people share one divided island. Haitians
are more Afrocentric and relate easily to their Black brethren in the wider
Caribbean and the United States.

By contrast, the people of the Dominican
Republic have been forced-fed to embrace their European/Spanish ancestry and to
eschew anything and all things African and Black. It is this mindset that
drives today's national xenophobia against Dominican-born Haitians now elevated
to governmental policy. The thing is that the Dominican Republic is better off --
slightly - economically than Haiti. That's a fact. But not by miles. The nation
is still a poor, struggling developing country -- just as its neighbor.

To be sure there are degrees of poverty
and want. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with serious
socio-economic challenges, an uneducated and under educated population and a
political system prone to self-inflicting pain. Today in the Dominican
Republic as tourists flock to pristine beaches, swanky hotels and shopping
malls, they have very little knowledge that a few miles away thousands of poor dispossessed
Haitians are under armed guard on plantations harvesting sugarcane, most of
which ends up in US kitchens. Called "Bateys" it is
the Dominican Republic's closely guarded secret of neo-slavery.

A Batey is place of unmanageable abject, grinding
poverty -- a Haitian sugar cane village of shacks, dirt roads, and shoeless and
naked children. There is no running water, no electricity, no school for young
children, no medical or health facilities. There are no paved roads or street
lights; just shacks, rows and rows of barely livable shacks. Sugar cane workers work from dawn to dusk,
seven days a week, cutting sugar cane by hand with machetes. For all of their
toil and sweat, men may make $5 per day, back breaking day after day.

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These dirt poor Haitian families live in
shacks about eight-foot-by-ten-foot in a structure of scrap pieces of wood --
nailed gingerly to the supporting "beams," which actually are just
branches and sticks. The roof is a combination of scraps of metal, banana tree
leaves, and random pieces of trash that have been tossed up there to try and
keep the rain out. Even slaves in 19th century America fared better
and these Haitians in 2016.

Each year, as the sugar
harvest approaches, as many as 20,000 Haitian workers are recruited with the
promise of steady work at higher pay than they can earn in Haiti, the poorer of
the two countries. With the complicity of military and immigration authorities,
these destitute immigrants are loaded onto trucks, stripped of their
identification papers, and transported in the middle of the night to the Bateyes,
where many are housed in concentration-camp-like barracks. Estimates of the
population of undocumented Haitians living in the camps range from 650,000 to
one million.

The Dominican Republic's
government wants to kick out vast majority of these stateless Haitians. They
are neither Haitian nor Dominican. They are exploited daily, are forced into
abject poverty, and are the faces of Dominican shame. These vulnerable,
defenseless Haitians and their children have been trapped in an endless cycle
of modern-day slavery by a government bent on revenge for what it sees as
historical wrongs committed in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution of 1804
and the knowing collusion of big sugar companies many of them incorporated in
the United States.

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Indeed, the animosity and
resentment against "Dark skinned Haitians" go back centuries. And today, it is
payback time today for Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

You see, Haiti was once a French colony, with its economy
based almost exclusively on plantation slavery. What's now the Dominican
Republic was Spanish. There were slaves on both sides of the island, but the
society and economy on the Spanish side were more diverse, with cattle ranches
and mines just as prevalent as sugar plantations. Under the brutal slave
oppression of the French, Haitians rose up and in 1804 defeated the French
forces and declared their independence as the world's first Black Republic.

Meanwhile, the landed white French gentry fled the young Haitian
Republic for the neighboring Dominican Republic. But Haitian military power was
strong enough to invade the Dominican Republic and put it under Black rule for the
next 20 years. But the pressures of European and American powers combined to
kill the Haitian Republic. Unfair and burdensome levies were imposed on the
Haitian government.

Infact, Haiti was ordered to pay France the astronomical sum,
by 1804 standards, of $150 million Francs, as restitution for revenues lost due
to slavery. That figure was reduced to
$60 million -- still a burdensome bill. What that meant was that a struggling
agricultural economy found it very difficult to pay up. The Haitian government therefore
levied heavy taxes on the Dominican people and its military confiscated food,
property and goods from them often at gunpoint. This only helped to deepen the
resentment between the two countries and races
- one already smarting from the humiliation of having been invaded by a
Black army.

For a people more socially and racially aligned to Spain and
Europe and who rejected their African heritage this was the final humiliation.
It what's at the root of hostility to Black Haitians today even though the country
still needs them to cut sugar cane -- an activity that most Dominicans do not
want to do because its back-breaking labor and is still reminds them of slavery
and their African past. Dominican's today, cognizant of this history, are still
stung by it.

Relations between the countries through the early 1800s were
long, complicated and bloody. But the key event was the long War of
Independence fought by Dominicans against Haiti,
which began in 1844. It's the longest war in the Republic's history. By
1930, when Dictator Rafael Trujillo seized power, he elevated and deepened
anti-Haiti sentiments to a national level putting the focus on his country's
European heritage. He presided over the
most intensive and brutal pogrom against Haitians to date.

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Such a racist and bigoted national policy culminated in the
mass murder over a few days of 20,000 Haitians in 1937. This was coupled with
other persecutions and brutal repressions including forced deportations, imprisonment,
beatings and extrajudicial killings.

So much so that in 2007, a United Nations Report compiled by
the Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights, described what it called
a "profound
and entrenched problem of racism and discrimination in Dominican society,
generally affecting blacks and particularly such groups as black Dominicans,
Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitians."

The scathing report continued: "While there is no
Government policy of racism and no legislation that is on the face of it
clearly discriminatory," it said, there clearly was a "discriminatory
impact" from "certain laws, particularly those relating to migration,
civil status and ... citizenship."

MICHAEL DERK ROBERTS
Small Business Consultant, Editor, and Social Media & Communications Expert, New York
Over the past 20 years I've been a top SMALL BUSINESS CONSULTANT and POLITICAL CAMPAIGN STRATEGIST in Brooklyn, New York, running (more...)